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[Summer]

Thoughts on the onset of summer

All roads are blocked to a philosophy which reduces everything to the word 'no.' To 'no' there is only one answer and that is 'yes.' Nihilism has no substance. There is no such thing as nothingness, and zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing. Man lives more by affirmation than by bread.

Victor Hugo

The opressive heat is showing up on the stage fervently, as the other extreme of the Delhi air makes its way towards the exit. The summer-versus-winter debate will persist, as long as the Qutb Minar towers overs the southern landscape of the city.

People who come from the northern and central part of the country have no fuss about summer, but for us hailing from the shielded hilly regions of the North East, this season is a curse. The hot spell urges me to go naked, literally, and this nakedness alters my consciousness... of things that can be and things that are. Sometimes I can be too demanding, working on my own time.

Nonetheless, it's time for some dry run before the 45-degree sultriness takes its toll on us. What's better than club soda in the evenings with umpteen pegs of whiskies. The numberless packets of fags, my euphonic guitar that waits for me every evening when I go back home from work — and I have got myself an accommodation with a balcony, just for this purpose.

If summer is around the corner, the unadorned happiness with bloody perspiration cannot be far behind. The antithesis between the swelter of a May evening and the nippy air of Decembers has made the concept of dialectic more explicit, whilst the contradiction invalidates the essence of life completely.

The summer, the winter, the spring and the autumn... amidst the endless hours at the office, the time we spend at home, the occasions we share with our kith and kin... and finally what we get is a place among the departed souls in riverside crematories.

There is an RH Blyth's quote that fits the bill: “If all men lead mechanical, unpoetical lives, this is the real nihilism, the real undoing of the world.” In A Short History of Decay, E. M. Cioran wrote: “The creations of the mind — and the principles which preside over them — follow the fate of our moods, of our age, of our fevers, and our disappointments. We call into question everything we once loved, and are always right and always wrong; for everything is valid — and nothing has any importance. I smile: a world is born; I frown: it vanishes, and another appears. No opinion, no system, no belief fails to be correct and at the same time absurd, depending on whether we adhere to it or detach ourselves from it.”

Frivolity, Corian noted, are for those mortal souls, who have decried ably the impossibility of certitude in our universe. Anyways, it's time to knock the warm clothes off and fetch the fans and coolers. ACs are only luxuries pro tem — the thoughts of their possession pep us up to flaunt our CVs in every jobsite on the internet. Perhaps this deliberation allows me to be in the camaraderie, otherwise I would be another psycho, flying over the cuckoo's nest. Yet, things disturb me, so much so that I have reached from summer to cuckoo's nest? There is no such thing as cosmic meaning for the entire universe: the essence, though it may be confusing, depends on the individual. It is like different impressions we have for a particular book according to our frame of reference.

It is, possibly, no surprise that the northerners can spend a June afternoon on a terrace, whistling and cutting jokes whilst we run helter-skelter to keep our bums cool. But in retrospection, it's been four years I have been spending my life here, and I could manage the show. So far so good.

What's the big deal, then? It is hard during daytime to run errands. But I can find serenity on my workstation as much as I can spend time on weekends, watching the great flicks on DVD. We 'glow' in the evening (because of the extreme heat and sweating), but that's the sign of the group I belong to, the lower strata of the consumer class. It's funny I would have had a different mindset if I were born with a big, lustrous silver spoon in my mouth.

No worries, though. The important thing is to have conviction in the different aspects of life. It is like what Albert Camus said: “In the depths of winter I finally learned there was in me an invincible summer.”

PS: Am I blowing hot and cold in this dilemma... that I have been residing in here even after all these days?